Dr. Tim S. Axelrod

Tim S.
Axelrod, Ph.D. is the Data Management Project Scientist for LSST,
the
Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.
Tim is discoverer of the first occultation of a star by a black hole.

Tim earned his BS in
Physics from
Caltech in 1969, an MS in Applied Physics from Stanford in 1971, and his
PhD in Physics and Astronomy from UC Santa Cruz in 1980. As a physicist
at Lawrence Livermore National Lab he was involved in a wide variety of
computational physics problems, and turned his attention to data
intensive astronomy projects in 1987.

After designing and
implementing
the data processing for a highly parallel satellite tracking system, he
went on to key data architect roles in TAOS, an asteroid occultation
survey; MACHO, a search for dark matter through microlensing; LBT, the
Large Binocular Telescope; and now LSST. MACHO was one of the first
optical astronomy projects that was possible only with large scale
databases and computing, and that tradition of pushing the edge of data
technology for astronomy is now epitomized by LSST.